Seventeen thousand perished in Paris during this reign of infidel terror. This ungodly abrogation of religion in France cost the nation three million of lives—_think of it!_ France’s most dark and damning record was the fruit of the tenets of the men that Col. Ingersoll lauds to the heavens. They were the fruits of the labors of the men with whom Tom Paine sat, and believed, and voted. “His faith was their faith.” “It was the Quaker Paine who worked for our independence, and not the infidel Paine. He did nothing in the interests of our national liberty after he avowed his irreligious principles.” Neither was he the first to raise the voice in favor of national liberty. Ten years before he wrote his work entitled “Common Sense,” at the suggestion of Franklin and Dr. Benjamin Rush, which was in 1776, Patrick Henry’s voice was heard amid the assembled colonists in Virginia. He said: “Cæsar had his Brutus, Charles I. his Cromwell, and George III.—” Just then some one cried out, “Treason!” After a pause, Henry added,—“may profit by their example.” Years before Tom Paine came to America, even in 1748, it went to record that American legislatures were tending to independence. “They were charged with presumption in declaring their own rights and privileges.” Our independence was predicted near at hand from 1758 and onwards. In 1774, before Paine came from England, the word freedom was ringing out upon the air. “James Otis was hailing the dawn of a new empire” in 1765. In this year there were utterances of such sentiments as tended to evolve the declaration of 1776, and these were heard all over the land from Boston to Charleston, S. C. In 1773 “Samuel Adams insisted that the colonies should have a congress to frame a bill of rights, or to form an independent state, an American commonwealth.” The North Carolinians renounced their allegiance to the king of England in the Mecklenberg declaration, which was made in May, 1775. But Paine’s little book, suggested by Dr. Benjamin Rush and Franklin, and called “Common Sense,” was published in 1776. Hildreth, writing of the year 1802, says that “Paine, instead of being esteemed as formerly, as a lover of liberty, whose pen has contributed to hasten the Declaration of Independence, was now detested by large numbers as the libeler of Washington.” In 1795 the _Aurora_ put out the following language, which seems to be that to which Hildreth alludes: “If ever a nation was debauched by a man, the American nation was debauched by Washington; if ever a nation was deceived by a man, the American nation has been deceived by Washington. Let the history of the federal government instruct mankind, that the mask of patriotism may be worn to conceal the foulest designs against the liberties of the people.” This, gentle reader, was from the pen of the man whom Mr. Ingersoll would immortalize if he could.